Politics: May 2004 Archives

"Universal health insurance" is one of the zillions of things that sounds great in theory, but in practice is less than perfect. Mark Steyn reprints a column he wrote four years ago on that subject. Did you know that it's illegal to receive medical care from anyone other than the government in Canada?

I've never quite understood the Church hierarchy's position on this matter. From what I've read, it considers health care to be a "human right," which I don't get: how can you have a "right" to a good that may or may not exist? Put another way, if there aren't any MRI machines or cardiologists in rural Namibia, how can you have a "right" to use those things?

Or is it a question of access -- that is, no one should be denied access to health care based on their social status, race, etc.? That doesn't seem to be what the hierarchy is saying, though. Skimming through the documents produced by the Vatican and NCCB, they believe people have a positive right to health care, that if an individual needs it, someone is obliged to provide it to him.

That opens up a raft of questions. First of all, who is obliged? The state, I'd assume, since the documents that address the subject seem to be directed towards governments. But that means the state must remove one good -- money -- from a group of citizens to pay for heath care. What if the people who receive the care could afford it by reducing their consumption of luxuries (cable TV, eating at restaurants, petty gambling, etc.)? Does the state still have an obligation?

You hear often in the U.S. about those 37 million people without health insurance. But they fall into two categories: the young and healthy, and the poor. Can we agree that if you're healthy, you don't need insurance nearly as much -- and if you do, it only needs to cover emergencies? And the two categories overlap quite a bit -- younger people make less money than older people because they have less experience. Why would a 23-year-old college graduate need a comprehensive insurance policy? And why would we treat him the same as a 38-year-old poor single mother caring for two children?

More: what kind of health care are we supposed to provide? Everything from routine doctor visits to extensive cancer treatments? Bandages, or just things like prosthetic limbs? Should every cancer patient be flown to the Mayo Clinic?

Not to mention that having a single entity controling all, or nearly all, of a good is an invitation to abuse. Why is it that everyone can see the danger in having one corporation control, say, the oil supply, but somehow if the government controls the medical system it is immune to human frailty?

When government sticks to basic public functions (defending the borders, stopping crime, enforcing contracts, etc.), it generally doesn't interfere with family life. When government has to take care of the population, by providing for the necessities of life, it will treat its citizens like a pestilence.

That's why Western Europe is slowly depopulating: its socialist states don't want to deal with so many people, so they discourage larger homes and drain families of money through confiscatory taxation. By contrast, in most of the rest of the world, the government doesn't directly provide private goods like health care or retirement pensions, so they don't care as much how many kids each family has. Socialism does not co-exist with the Culture of Death. Socialism is the culture of death.

I know that much of this is grounded in the "universal destination of material goods," that all things have their origin in God and thus will return to the Creator at the end of time. However, that presumes that there are a finite number of particular goods in the world. My employer gives me money in exchange for the work I produce. If I sit at home all day eating Cheetos and watching TV, I am not producing anything (except a bad example for my kids), for a net loss of goods in the world.

There is not a finite amount of "health care," the way there is a finite amount of land on Earth. Its existence is dependent on human activity and not natural phenomena. The question is how to make sure those who are truly needy get the medical care they need, not how to snare everyone -- rich and poor, healthy and sick -- into a gigantic, unworkable government bureaucracy.

I've heard it said that the Church has much to say about how goods ought to be used, but not much about how goods are created. Much of that topic is outside its competence as the final authority on faith and morals, but the bishops should consider giving us some guidance as to how we can address the question.

Here's another mind-numbingly stupid statement made by Gore during his conniption yesterday - via yahoo news.

He said that Kerry should not "tie his own hands" while campaigning by offering any specific proposals for how he would handle a situation that is "rapidly changing and, unfortunately, rapidly deteriorating."

Does Gore think America collectively fell off a turnip truck and sustained massive head injuries? How can a politician campaign without offering specific proposals? The democrats have a tenor not unlike the cicadas infesting the lovely Washington Metro area - a senseless, high-pitched whine.

Yes, Algore actually said that today: "Dominance is as dominance does," just like Forrest Gump. I don't think he was trying to be funny. "Stupid is as stupid does" didn't make sense in the movie, and it doesn't make sense in a long, rambling, screaming speech either. Below are excerpts from his speech with my comments in italics.

As I was walking in downtown D.C., I saw a story in the Washington Post that actually made me purchase the paper:

U.S. Forces Move Into Stronghold Of Cleric Insurgents Scatter as Hunt For Their Leader Intensifies

KARBALA, Iraq, May 23 -- U.S. forces expanded an offensive against rebel cleric Moqtada Sadr on Sunday by pushing into his stronghold of Kufa for the first time, as his armed followers vanished from the streets of this Shiite holy city.

The battle for southern Iraq, which has occupied U.S. soldiers for weeks, appears to have shifted from a broad engagement across several fronts to a sustained battle aimed at a single elusive objective: Sadr, who leads thousands of militiamen, known as the Mahdi Army.

For seven weeks, U.S. forces have been killing scores of the fighters loyal to Sadr, who has fomented an anti-American insurrection in a region once receptive to the occupation....

Wait a sec...what's that again? "U.S. forces have been killing scores of the fighters loyal to Sadr"? Not just a few here and there, but scores of them? Boy, I don't remember seeing that on "Today," my morning infotainment show! Must have missed it between the Iraqi prison photos and the 13,406th segment on low-carb dieting.

So it would appear that our war efforts are not failing. You will recall that less than a month ago, Iraq was on the verge of a full-scale civil war, and that arresting the respected Shiite thug leader Sadr was going to inspire the citizens to revolt, and the security situation was "deteriorating," quagmire Vietnam failure unilateral blood-for-oil rama-lama-ding-dong.

Then the media abruptly switched to the prison abuse story. We are informed -- by reporters who, judging by their stories, rarely venture out of their air-conditioned offices except under the protection of the U.S. military -- that Arab opinion is "enraged" by these photos, trotting out numbers about how only .00034% of Moroccan Bedouins support Iraqi occupation, etc.

I remember reading similar poll numbers two years ago, before we even invaded Iraq. What's the difference? And in a country where everyone -- literally, everyone -- had a family member imprisoned or murdered by the former regime, are Iraqis really that fainthearted?

Think back to 6-8 months ago, when the occupation was "failing" because "services" were not restored to the populace. Recall the endless stories from Baghdad about the electricity going out sometimes (which reporters noticed because that screwed up their laptop batteries.) Today, Iraq has more electricity than before the war, water is more abundant, schools are open, food is plentiful, etc. You never hear about the "services" because they all work, more or less, at least as well as the top-tier Third World countries.

I've written in Catholic Light about how the press has a meta-narrative for just about everything they write (if I didn't, I meant to write about it.) Because of the exigencies of writing against a deadline, reporters can't re-think The Big Picture every time they sit down to compose an article. So they have these meta-narratives they use. You know them:

Gays Are Conquering Prejudice to Claim Their Full Civil Rights

Greedy Corporations Cause Lack of Medical Insurance

Catholic Church Resists the Noble Forces of Modern Liberalism

Minorities Get Shafted -- Again

Women Can Do Anything Despite Men's Efforts to Keep Them Down

In this case, the meta-narrative is "U.S. Occupation Failing." The narrative of an individual story is just a subset of the meta-narrative. Thus, lack of electricity is proof that the occupation is failing. So are random bombings of soldiers, and mass murders of innocent Iraqis. So are disgusting pictures of prison abuse. Or meaningless polls.

You see what I mean? Even though the original justifications for the conclusion have evaporated, the conclusion rolls along, because it's the meta-narrative. Intellectual honesty would seem to demand a re-assessment of the conclusion, given that the facts have changed dramatically, but none is forthcoming.

You could list many huge stories the press has gotten wrong in the last 20 years, including the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise of radical Islam and its threat to America. Yet by and large, after missing big stories, journalists don't collectively scratch their heads and say, "How the heck did we miss that one?" They just adjust their meta-narratives, even though that approach got them into trouble in the first place.

In five weeks, there will likely be more violence after Iraq gets its sovereignty. Mark my words, that will spark another round of breast-beating. The occupation could fail, but the cause won't be the policies or the people involved. It may happen because the news media will have sold their defeat meta-narrative to the American public.

Then thousands and thousands of Iraqis will die. Does that futher peace on earth? Is it good and right to allow innocent human beings to die in order to defeat President Bush? It would be nice if the media re-thought their commitment to this storyline, before it's too late.

A little local news here: security nabobs for this summer's Dem convention in Boston are planning to shut down the city's inbound highways and commuter rail access for four days in July. Even Mayor Tom ("Mumbles") Menino, who brought this money-losing disaster to town for the glory of Massachusetts Democrats, has given up the happy face and is telling businesses to take the week off.

What are the odds that the voters will make the Dems pay a price for this? Slim and none.

YOUR CAPTION HERE

The first question: why is Eric awake at 3 a.m.? Because I had to fix something at work, and I want to wait a few minutes before going to bed, in case the thing breaks again.

The next question: is Maureen Dowd the dumbest prominent columnist in America, or the most prominent dumb columnist in America? Many people read her because for some reason they read the New York Times, a habit I've never cultivated or even understood. Every time I read Dowd's columns I feel like I'm reading a 19-year-old undergrad who thinks she's clever because she writes alliterations and gives lame nicknames to public figures she doesn't like ("Rummy," et al.)

So it's not just that I disagree with her -- a forgivable offense -- she's a crappy writer, and furthermore, one of the many pseudo-Catholics who gets agitated when the Holy Father disagrees with the NYT magisterium. She is someone whose views I can safely ignore.

Then I read this piece, and my wonder at Dowd's prominence is renewed. It's a pastiche of anti-Bush statements that all begin "In Bushworld," which is so fascinatingly clever that she's now writing a book called "Bushworld." How can someone who writes so ineptly, who regurgitates left-liberal pieties on command, get to be one of the top columnists in America? This piece (of...) is begging to be fisked thusly:

"In Bushworld, we can win over Fallujah by bulldozing it."

We didn't, MD. We ordered the Marines to stop fighting before they succeeded in killing the vicious thugs who are killing innocent Iraqis. That was in all the papers, including yours.

"In Bushworld, it was worth going to war so Iraqis could express their feelings ("Down With America!") without having their tongues cut out, although we cannot yet allow them to express intemperate feelings in newspapers ("Down With America!") without shutting them down."

We shut down one newspaper because it was blaming murders by insurgents on the Coalition, and was fomenting violence against the Coalition. Even in America, you can't agitate for killing government officials. Maybe you can in Dowdworld.

"In Bushworld, you don't consult your father, the expert in being president during a war with Iraq, but you do talk to your Higher Father, who can't talk back to warn you to get an exit strategy or chide you for using Him for political purposes."

Nice -- borders on blasphemy. God can't talk back to you? News to me. Why do so many people bother talking to him, then? What did they teach you in your alleged Catholic upbringing, MD? While we're at it, what's your exit strategy? Care to express an actual idea instead of sniping?

"In Bushworld, you get to strut around like a tough military guy and paint your rival as a chicken hawk, even though he's the one who won medals in combat and was praised by his superior officers for fulfilling all his obligations."

Except most people who were with Kerry in Vietnam have said he's a disgrace to those medals, because he repeated lies about alleged atrocities that didn't happen and impugned the character of Vietnam servicemen. Plus, he didn't fulfill all his obligations -- he ran away from his men after four months in country. Anyway, you don't care about medals or heroism anyway, so why bring it up?

"In Bushworld, you brag about how well Afghanistan is going, even though soldiers like Pat Tillman are still dying and the Taliban are running freely around the border areas, hiding Osama and delaying elections."

If everything isn't going perfectly, nothing is going right and you can't talk about any successes. Is that the formula? Let's see if MD sticks to it if Kerry is elected.

"In Bushworld, we went to war to give Iraq a democratic process, yet we disdain the democratic process that causes allies to pull out troops."

Just because a decision was arrived at democratically doesn't mean we have to like it. The "democratic process" gave us Jim Crow, forced sterilization of "mental defectives," Chancellor Hitler, and the income tax. We can be against those things without impugning the "process" that produced them, can't we?

When I used to read the best liberal columnists, I often thought, "Hmm, that's a good point -- I wonder what a good response would be." Now I think, "Are we living in different universes?"

"The guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night," says the report, when they thought no one was watching. "Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuses of power." Those sentences aren't from a report on the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. They're the words of Stanford University psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo, past-president of the American Psychological Association, describing what happened during his classic experiment that simulated prison life in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.

Read the whole thing.

Example number one: Michael Moore

'Fahrenheit 9/11': Connecting With a Hard Left - washpost - registration required so those pinkos can keep track of you.

Why is the title of Moore's flim inspired by Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451? How ironic that Bradbury's work is about censorship and anti-intellectualism. Left-wing propaganda doesn't get more anti-intellectual than Fahrenheit 9/11.

*UPDATE*

Example number two: The nuts who cooked up The Day After Tomorrow, Al Gore, and moveon.org. Algore and the like-minded irrational animals at moveon.org are planning a rally the day that The Day After Tomorrow Comes out. I sense a Passion of the Christ kind of passion for the message of this disaster film. It's a new gospel written by the liberal illuminati. They'd like to see us all live like Franciscans of the Primitive Observance without the poverty, charity, humility, and of course, faith in Christ.

Moveon.org is calling this flick "the movie the White House doesn't want you to see." They admit the movie is "more science fiction than science fact," yet they trying to score political points by scaring the poop of people who can't separate science fact from science fiction. They vote for democrats, you know.

On the weekends, after the older two children invade our bed, and I have gathered the courage to face the morning, I herd the little ones downstairs so they can watch something while I make breakfast. As we have no cable or satellite television, the television in the playroom is usually tuned to a PBS station.

While the "Thomas the Tank Engine" video was rewinding, I saw part of "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly" describing how Catholic politicians are feeling the heat for not acting like Catholics while in office.

I have expressed my displeasure with PBS religious programming in another post, but this segment was evenhanded. It did, however, give disproportionate attention to Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor and failed radio talk-show host. I couldn't immediately remember the part of my right-wing catechism that talked about hating Mario. All I remember was that he was prickly about his ethnic background (as if being Italian in New York City was unusual) and was, for a time, the #1 apologist for pro-abortion Catholics, including himself. As I was not Catholic in the 1980s or the early '90s, when Cuomo was governor, I didn't care too much about the Catholic angle, so I didn't remember the details.

The only other time I heard Cuomo speak was on his short-lived radio show, and that was probably by accident. He seemed affable but clueless about what makes good radio, as evidenced by the show's brief run. On this PBS show, he seemed thoughtful and possibly even prayerful, talking about why he was personally pro-life but politically pro-abortion.

"Maybe I can respect this guy," I thought, as Cuomo explained that Catholics had Protestant beliefs crammed down their throats a century ago, so Catholics shouldn't do the same to other people. That's a plausible point, though as I keep saying, abortion isn't a religious issue, it's a straight-up question of natural law. But at least Cuomo appeared to have thought the issue through, and if he was misguided, he was honestly misguided.

The show moved on to capital punishment. Cuomo complained (always in a genial way) that the Church didn't do enough to speak out about capital punishment. "For 12 years" he opposed capital punishment, and he claimed, "I even wrote the pope, saying 'come on guys, help me out here!'"

This tactic was a clever way of saying that he was, in point of fact, more Catholic than the Pope, more pro-life than the Roman curia. Then it all came flooding back: this was the same man who vetoed laws authorizing capital punishment, even though New York voters favored it by a huge margin and the bills always passed by comfortable majorities. Those bills were passed every year until Cuomo left office, and always shot down by the governor.

It takes courage to stand up for your beliefs when they are unpopular, especially for a politician who must stand for re-election, so points for Mario. But we have to subtract points for honesty. For although Mario loves giving his hand-wringing moral lectures about the inner conflict of a Catholic politician when his beliefs differ from what his constituents want, he "allowed his personal beliefs" to "interfere" with his "duty" to do whatever the opinion polls tell him to do.

Mario Cuomo might be sincere and misguided, or he might just be running interference for the Left in the cases of the death penalty and abortion. However, he wants everyone to know he is a serious, deliberate man, and therefore I agree with the latter possibility.

Show me any Reuters article from the Middle East, and I'll show you at least one editorializing sentence. In this case, it's the lead:

ABU GHRAIB, Iraq (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew into the eye of the Iraqi storm on Thursday and denied his surprise visit was a publicity stunt to repair the damage from a scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

What kind of crap is that? It shocks me that a "serious" news organization would imply that the Secretary of Defense should not visit a theater of operations, or that by doing so, he is

They're not even subtle. Usually, reporters who want to write stealth editorials will find someone else to mouth their agendas, but Charles Aldinger is apparently too lazy to do that.

The trip looked like a robust answer to critics who say Rumsfeld, one of the architects of the Iraq war, should resign, six months before President Bush seeks re-election.

"Looked like" to whom? The article doesn't say, so we can safely assume it's the reporter.

It's also pretty bad to quote Senator Kennedy ("We are the most hated nation in the world as a result of this disastrous policy in the prisons") accusing the Defense Department of deliberately abusing prisoners as a matter of policy -- something no Democrat has previously done, and there is no evidence to support the charge. Aldinger reports the comment as if it is a fact.

Then again, Reuters doesn't call terrorists "terrorists," because "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." I'm not sure whether that's moral equivalence or rank nihilism, but it's sick, whatever it is.

The majority leader of the New Jersey state senate is leaving the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church because the church wants her children to stop supporting baby-killing. This entirely reasonable request was too much for Senator Bernard Kenny (D-Moloch), who said, "If every faith starts trying to impose their rules on elected officials, democracy is going to be factionalized along religious lines," apparently thinking that there is something "religious" about defending innocent babies.

As interesting as that is, one other quotation caught my bloodshot eye:

U.S. Rep. William Pascrell Jr., also a Catholic Democrat, agrees that politicians have an obligation to represent all their constituents. "This is exactly what the Catholic Church said 50 years ago would not happen when Catholic politicians were trying to get elected to office," said Kenny, a former altar boy from Essex County....

"I will continue receiving Communion - not in defiance, but out of conscience," he said. "I have nothing to apologize for."

That should be Hell's new official motto:

I have not read a comparison of the last three Democratic presidential candidates, not even in the narrow subject of their proposed policies. Perhaps that's because Senator Kerry has few specific proposals, but I am not interested in that right now. What strikes me is that Clinton, Gore, and Kerry are all Hollow Men.

I use that term not to express my contempt for their politics, but as a description of their souls, at least the aspects of their souls we can see without knowing them personally. "The Hollow Men" was one of the most famous poems of the 20th century, composed by T.S. Eliot in 1925 and still frighteningly relevant today. He sings of men who are dessicated to the roots of their being, mere shadows of men.

On the surface, the three men seem very different. The Arkansas kid from a broken home, the son whose senator-father programmed him to succeed in politics, and the Swiss-boarding-school product have few superficial similarities. Yet consider these things: all of them knew at a very young age that they would run for president, and calibrated their actions accordingly. They spent nearly their entire adult lives in politics, and virtually no time in the private sector.

None of them have any discernable principles for which they have worked during their political lives, and they have introduced no significant ideas into politics. Their primary concern is promoting themselves, not for the sake of a cause, but solely for personal advancement. The three men reject traditional understandings of morality in favor of a fuzzy relativism.

Because they do not seek to destroy and murder their opponents like a Middle Eastern despot, their danger to the body politic is not immediately apparent. Whatever one might think of Jimmy Carter, for example, he was not a Hollow Man in that he truly attempted to serve others when he was in office, and though ambitious (what high officeholder isn't?), he did not allow his ambition to enslave him.

By contrast, the Hollow Men will subordinate everything and anything to their ambitions. They fought in the Vietnam War, they protested against it; they spoke out against abortion, they promise to nominate only doctrinaire pro-abortion judges; they say they will propose a tax cut, they raise your taxes; etc.

Sane men change their opinions in the light of new facts or upon deeper reflection. The Hollow Men change their opinions based on their perception of the world's trajectory. Every action has raw calculation behind it: will this gain me votes or will it lose me votes?

What frightens me is not simply that the Hollow Men are self-serving and venal, devoid of higher purpose. We will always have such men until Jesus comes again. What frightens me is that so many ordinary people vote for them. What frightens me more is that millions of ordinary people are exactly like them.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

[Read the whole poem]

Six weeks ago, I wrote this:

Sen. Kerry is the kind of officer that enlisted men loathe -- working the system for his own benefit instead of theirs, advancing his own interests with no loyalty to those underneath him....I'd be curious to see what his former subordinates really think of him. They're probably too classy to denounce their former commanding officer in public, but it would be great to get them into a bar and see what they say after a few drinks.

Now we know: they don't think he should be the commander-in-chief.

UPDATE: Read this essay for a first-hand look at why Kerry doesn't measure up.

The guy on the right is Andy Rosenberg, who is running for Congress in the Virginia 8th District. He's competing for the Democratic nomination with Rep. Jim Moran, possibly the sleaziest man in Congress. Why is he sleazy? Let's see...

• He exploited his young, dying son to win re-election;

• When he divorced his second wife, she accused him of beating her up, which he did not contest in court;

• He has been in at least two physical fights in the Capitol building;

• He accepted "interest-free loans" from a person with business in front of his congressional committee;

• Two of his lovers showed up simultaneously at 2 a.m. to "help him celebrate his birthday" -- but they didn't know about each other, and they proceeded to get into a screaming, hair-pulling fight until the Alexandria police arrived (that's my favorite Moran anecdote); And

• He started screaming at a priest at Blessed Sacrament parish who tried to correct him about some matter, and had to be restrained. (Blessed Sacrament was one of the "problem" parishes in the Arlington Diocese, at least until they sent in Father Creegan, a no-nonsense pastor who went into the priesthood after retiring as a Marine lieutenant colonel.) Do I even need to mention that Moran is pro-abortion?

Those are just the things I remembered off the top of my head. Moran is in trouble now because he said it weren't for those meddling Jews, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq. Rosenberg's primary challenge arose from the backlash against that silly comment.

Though I didn't know anything about Rosenberg, I considered voting for him in the primary, figuring he couldn't be worse than Moran. I was wrong. At least Moran voted against partial-birth abortion. Rosenberg is all for it. I guess that's what comes when you are a legislative aide to Sen. Kennedy for three years.

Below is a message I sent to Rosenberg after reviewing his opinions on the issues.